There’s been a lot of talk about HTML5 and all of the new elements it introduces. Forms will be built and used completely differently, the structure of documents will be much more semantic, and new features will be available to website and application developers.

But, what are these semantic elements? Are they really anything new? Will they change the structure of your document at all? The simple answer is “no”. The new elements, for the most part, just make your documents easier to parse and understand (for machines and for people using assistive technology). Very few of the new elements are really all that new; they’re just the same old elements with new names for new purposes.

I am taking John Allsopp’s HTML5 Live course offered by SitePoint (a great deal, by the way), right now, and he shared a neat little tip that I wanted to pass on. You can use many of the new HTML5 elements (header, article, section, etc.) right now, even in older browsers like Internet Explorer 7.

All you need to do is add an extra “boolean attribute” to the element, and you can then style them with CSS in almost all of the browsers currently being used.